Copyright Contracts and Earnings of Visual Creators: A Survey of 5,800 British Designers, Fine Artists, Illustrators and Photographers

There is a common perception that digitisation has prompted changes in creative labour markets. In particular, it is widely assumed that exploiters insist on "grabbing rights" (i.e. broadly conceived assignments of rights), that visual artists are not able to negotiate, that they are paid less and less, and that they are compelled to waive their moral rights. This study suggests a much more equivocal picture. In place of a straightforward narrative of decline, the results of the survey suggest that in most fields there has been less change over the last decade than one might have expected: that, terms of exploitation are most often about the same. That is not to say that there are no discernible changes in particular occupations and media. Respondents and interviewees identify some important shifts. Perhaps surprisingly, it seems there are changes in practice that are, from the creator's perspective, both positive and negative. The most positive change is identified amongst the fine artists where half (50%) see their personal bargaining position as having improved, with only 6% perceiving a weakening. The most disturbing changes are in relation to photographers. About half of all photographers (49%) say their bargaining position has worsened, with only 22% reporting improvements. A significant percentage of photographers (40%) report an increase in assignments (compared with 6% who think they have decreased). Moreover, 24% report an increase in moral rights waivers (compared to 3% who identify a decrease), and a decline in the practice of attribution. 31% of photographers see attribution as decreasing over the last decade, and only 8% increasing. 28% say income from secondary use has decreased, while only 16% say it has decreased

A descriptive and evaluative bibliography of films in secondary school literature

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston UniversitySTATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM.-- This thesis was written to compile a descriptive and evaluative bibliography of films which might supplement instruction in literature from grades seven through twelve. JUSTIFICATION.-- Such a study, to the best of the writers' knowledge, is non-existent. In order to conserve unnecessary expenditure of time and effort by teachers in search of films appropriate to their units of instruction, such a listing must be devised. Commercial catalogs often list such important data as: title, running time, producer, and cost; but they rarely give an objective description of the content of the film as related to the objectives of teaching literature as stated in the publication of The National Council of Teachers of English. PROCEDURE.-- The writers considered themselves a basic evaluation committee formed to appraise a large number of educational films related to teaching literature. In order to substantiate their appraisals, they invited large numbers of teachers to attend the twice-weekly preview showings. A check-list comprised of thirteen items to analyze the films from a pedagogical point of view was devised and circulated among the evaluators attending. Forty-seven films were obtained from Boston University School of Public Relations, The Boston Public Library, The University of New Hampshire, and leading producers of such films who offered full cooperation to the writers throughout the nine-week period of the showings [TRUNCATED]

For Better, or For Worse: Photographing in a Digitally Cluttered Crowd

In recent years, smartphones have been utilized to photograph treasured moments. However, some are unaware they are distracting others in events such as weddings. The distracting smartphone user could potentially obstruct professional wedding photographers and hinder them from capturing priceless shots. The purpose of this thesis is to research the motive behind the addictive nature of smartphones and potentially decrease the number of smartphone pictures taken during the wedding ceremonies. The goal of this study is to bring awareness to the problem and to create a mobile application, which could then reduce the intrusiveness of smartphones during weddings. The researcher will observe wedding ceremonies in the United States, interview several wedding planners and other photographers to see if they have any suggestions for correcting “guest photographers,” and survey the general public to note their experience with cellphones at weddings

Flickr: A case study of Web2.0

The “photosharing” site Flickr is one of the most commonly cited examples used to define Web2.0. This paper explores where Flickr’s real novelty lies, examining its functionality and its place in the world of amateur photography. The paper draws on a wide range of sources including published interviews with its developers, user opinions expressed in forums, telephone interviews and content analysis of user profiles and activity. Flickr’s development path passes from an innovative social game to a relatively familiar model of a website, itself developed through intense user participation but later stabilising with the reassertion of a commercial relationship to the membership. The broader context of the impact of Flickr is examined by looking at the institutions of amateur photography and particularly the code of pictorialism promoted by the clubs and industry during the C20th. The nature of Flickr as a benign space is premised on the way the democratic potential of photography is controlled by such institutions. Several optimistic views of the impact of Flickr such as its facilitation of citizen journalism, “vernacular creativity” and in learning as an “affinity space” are evaluated. The limits of these claims are identified in the way that the system is designed to satisfy commercial purposes, continuing digital divides in access and the low interactivity and criticality on Flickr. Flickr is an interesting source of change, but can only to be understood in the perspective of long term development of the hobby and wider social processes

Collaborative Feature Learning from Social Media

Image feature representation plays an essential role in image recognition and related tasks. The current state-of-the-art feature learning paradigm is supervised learning from labeled data. However, this paradigm requires large-scale category labels, which limits its applicability to domains where labels are hard to obtain. In this paper, we propose a new data-driven feature learning paradigm which does not rely on category labels. Instead, we learn from user behavior data collected on social media. Concretely, we use the image relationship discovered in the latent space from the user behavior data to guide the image feature learning. We collect a large-scale image and user behavior dataset from Behance.net. The dataset consists of 1.9 million images and over 300 million view records from 1.9 million users. We validate our feature learning paradigm on this dataset and find that the learned feature significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art image features in learning better image similarities. We also show that the learned feature performs competitively on various recognition benchmarks

A descriptive and evaluative bibliography of mathematics filmstrips.

Submitted by A.W. Clark and R.W. Allen for the degree of Master of Arts and by C.H. Gardner and R.F. Sweeney for the degree of Master of Education. Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston UniversityThe purpose of this paper is to present in one volume (1) a bibliography of all mathematics filmstrips from those suitable for the first grade to those suitable for use in senior high school and college, (2) an accurate description of each filmstrip, and (3) unbiased evaluations of each filmstrip by qualified teachers invited to take part in the project. Concomitant problems. The foregoing three parts were the heart of the problem and the portion nearly completely solved. There were, however, concomitant problems which have been partially solved by this work. The first of these concerns the limited use of filmstrips by mathematics teachers. Undoubtedly many do not believe in using filmstrips in mathematics classes. Others have never given serious thought about the advisability of using filmstrips. In later sections of this chapter and throughout this work evidence is cited to support the contention that filmstrips should have serious consideration, and that they are useful in mathematics classes. The second concomitant problem concerns the revision of current filmstrips and production of new ones. The filmstrip producers were supplied, upon their request, with summaries of the evaluations. Summaries were supplied only at the producer's request; for unless they were interested enough to request the summaries, they probably would not be interested in changing or improving their filmstrips. Summary. The problem, then, had three major parts: listing , describing, and evaluating mathematics filmstrips, and two concomitant parts: arousing the mathematics teacher's interest in filmstrips, and encouraging producers to make better productions and necessary revisions in current productions. [TRUNCATED

For Cultural Democracy: A Critique of Elitism in Art Education

After reading a good deal about the Reagan administration’s proposed arts policy, I was a bit shaken to discover a strikingly Reagan-like art education policy espoused in the front pages of the July, 1981 issue of Art Education. Was it possible that the nationwide rise of political and cultural conservatism was finding its way into the ranks of our own profession? Over the years, I had come to know art educators as persons of generally liberal persuasion, but here was philosophy and rhetoric to match the best of the Reagan arts advisors. The article causing my surprise was Elitism Versus Populism: A Question of Quality. The writer was Ralph A. Smith, Executive Secretary of the Council for Policy Studies in Art Education, a group which seeks to promulgate and assess policy for the profession

Comparing cultural classification

This article seeks to elucidate over time changes and cross-national variations in the status of art forms through a comprehensive content analysis of the coverage given to arts and culture in elite newspapers of four different countries – France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States – in the period 1955-2005. The authors explore how cultural hierarchy is affected by spe- cific features of these societies and their respective journalistic and cultural production fields. The four countries show significant differences in journalistic attention to high and popular arts. Throughout the period of study, the American newspapers and to a slightly lesser extent, French elite newspapers generally devote more attention to popular art forms than their Dutch and Ger- man counterparts. In accounting for cross-national differences in the coverage given to popular culture, field level factors like the structure of the newspaper market and the position and size of local cultural industries seem more important than remote societal factors such as national cultural repertoires a